Ophélie Lechat

I caved about a month and a half ago — I traded up. I said good-bye to my black, shiny  4 gigabyte iPod Nano (circa 2005) and bought a black, shiny, 32 gigabyte iPod Touch. At least the back of this one is also mirrored, which is great for reapplying lipstick on the metro.

I’m now one of those annoying people who have apps for everything. Well, not everything. I’m still waiting for the Royal Bank to come out with an application that works as well as ING’s.  I don’t yet have a knitting row-counter or stitch dictionary.

Here are the ones I use constantly and that have made my life (dare I say it?) easier.

• Email, of course. I wake up at 6am, feed Delilah (the cat) and check my email on my iPod. It’s faster than starting up my computer, and I can go back to bed if there’s nothing important.
• Simplenote. It’s the cleanest, easiest notetaking application. You can email the notes to yourself in one click.
• Lose It!, when I need to track what I eat. The caloric information isn’t always perfect (there are a lot of American fast-food entries) but to keep track of what I eat, it’s simple and fast.
• Mtl Mobile. Every Montrealer should fork over $4 and buy this! Every schedule for the busses in Montreal, Laval and Longueuil, downloaded to the iPod. I can check what time the next bus is coming from the metro platform.
• Instapaper. Everyone should fork over $5 and buy this!  Before I leave the house, I open every new link on Arts & Letters Daily and save them to Instapaper. Same thing for any other interesting article. I read them on my way to class. Much easier than dragging my laptop.
• Couch to 5k. More on this later — it’s a beginner’s running program that I try every year. I usually drop out after a few days, but this year I’m still going strong after almost four weeks, and I credit this app for my success.
• Mark Bittman’s How to Cook Everything. It saves all of his recipes to the iPod. Useful at the grocery store.
• Skype. Super useful when I have a wifi connection.
• Bejeweled 2. It’s J’s fault. One round of this game lasts one minute, so it’s easy to say “I’ll just play for a few metro stations…” and then forget to look up.